Budget Cuts to Delay Assembly of U.S. Space Station for a Year

With still more budget cuts in prospect, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Thursday told Congress that reductions already made for fiscal 1988 and 1989 will delay the first assembly work on a permanent U.S. space station until 1995.

The one-year delay, the space agency said, will add about $1.4 billion to the total cost of the orbiting station, but Administrator James C. Fletcher said that the station’s astronaut-tended laboratory would be moved up on the assembly schedule to allow scientific work to begin as soon as possible.

With an objective of having a permanently manned station in orbit by the mid-1990s, NASA asked Congress for $767 million in the current fiscal year, but lawmakers--pressed to meet budget reduction requirements of the Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction law--trimmed $342 million.

For the fiscal year beginning next Oct. 1, NASA had hoped to have $1.8 billion available, but Administration budget makers would ask Congress for only $1 billion.

Influential members of Congress have warned NASA officials that the $1-billion request will be reduced as well.

Current estimates are that the station itself will cost some $14.6 billion, calculated in 1988 dollars, but the sum is increased with the addition of operating costs.

The decision to delay the program rather than reduce the scope of the station was made, Fletcher explained, because some $600 million has already been invested in designing the facility.

Under the revised plan, the space shuttle will ferry the first structural parts of the station into orbit in early 1995. To prevent a delay in getting scientific returns from the complex, Fletcher said that the station’s pressurized laboratory will be carried aboard the fourth flight of the station assembly series rather than the sixth as previously scheduled.

Under the revised plan, the pressurized lab, which will be periodically visited by astronauts to install and remove experiments and service equipment, will be launched by the shuttle in late 1995.

“Such a capability,” NASA said in a report, “will permit earlier scientific, technological and commercial activity on the station, thus reaping many of the benefits of the program at the earliest possible stage.”

Altogether some 16 shuttle launches will be required to assemble the station the length of a football field and bring it into full operation.